Bill Gates predicted in 1995 that the Internet would help rural people stay put, in part because they would have the same advantages as city slickers in the virtual world. He made that prophecy in "The Road Ahead," a book whose jacket showed Mr. Gates standing in the middle of an empty highway in remote eastern Washington. But when Mr. Gates, the richest man in the world, returned recently to the land of no stoplights as part of the last phase of a five-year philanthropic effort to put computers in every poor library district in the United States, he acknowledged that the road ahead was full of blind curves.
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